


Pressure Pro

by warriorpoet



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-16
Updated: 2015-01-16
Packaged: 2018-03-07 19:26:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3180362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/warriorpoet/pseuds/warriorpoet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lydia survives, but what kind of life is it?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pressure Pro

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sylvestris](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sylvestris/gifts).



Lydia is in a medically induced coma for nine days.

Her breathing is mechanical, her blood is filtered, she is fed through a needle in her skin.

She is trapped in her body, but in her dormant mind she runs. She runs until she's backed into dark corners. She comes out of them, screaming.

When she wakes up, she remembers none of it.

***

"Where is my daughter?"

"Ms. Quayle, you need to calm down."

"No, no, I need to go home. You don't understand. You have to let me out of here."

She fights against the tubes and the wires, the gentle hand of the nurse that presses on her arm like a boulder.

It's the third time this has happened today.

"You can't get out of bed, Ms. Quayle, you're still very weak, you need to rest – "

"Fine. Fine!" Lydia sits stiffly back against the pillows. "Get me – can you get me internet access? A laptop or, or something? Even a newspaper. That woman on the morning shift said she would get me newspapers for the days I've missed, and then she was nowhere to be found."

"Yes, I can get you a newspaper. Just, please, stay in bed."

"It's very important!" she attempts to shout at the nurse's departing back, but her voice comes out as only a dry, thin squeak.

***

The news cycle has left her behind. 

She finds an article on page four about the recovery of the DEA agents' bodies that recaps enough for her to figure out that Heisenberg is dead, and that he did in fact take Todd and Jack and the others with him.

Nobody knows about her yet. If they did, she'd be handcuffed to the railings of her hospital bed.

There's a tense arrhythmia in her chest that has nothing to do with the after effects of the poisoning. She feels like a sitting duck here, this ICU with its glass walls and anyone who can throw on a set of scrubs able to come and go on a whim. Pinkman is unaccounted for. With Todd and the others gone, there's no guarantee that Skyler White will be unafraid to talk about her. It's only a matter of time before the FBI will want to question her, wanting to know exactly how she knew to tell the doctors in the emergency room that she'd ingested ricin. They'll want to know how she could've come into contact with it, and if it was deliberate, who could have done it. They could trace her movements, see her trip to Albuquerque the day she got sick, the months of weekly trips before that, connect the dots between Madrigal and Pollos and Heisenberg and a gang of neo-Nazis dead in a meth lab and their product on the streets of the Czech Republic. 

In the safe in her home office, there's a business card that Gus gave her a long time ago. A man in Albuquerque who gives people new identities, black market witness protection for those who don't want to testify to anything. She doesn't feel safe going to Albuquerque, but she doesn't feel safe here.

Lydia watches the nurses' station carefully, checking their patterns of movement. When their backs are turned or their eyes are busy, she swings her legs over the side of the bed and gasps as she lowers her feet down to the cold floor. She tries to bear the weight of her small frame turned smaller.

It takes a while before she gets up the strength to be discharged against medical advice.

***

For a brief moment, she thinks about going without Kiira. 

On the run, she can't guarantee what will happen to her daughter. Leaving her behind means that if law enforcement storms her house however many months or years down the road, Kiira won't be around to see her mother thrown to the floor in handcuffs, hit with an endless number of drug trafficking charges, dragged off to federal prison. She won't come home from school to find an empty house and a broken down door. Lydia thinks that's the best she could hope for.

When she sends Delores home after two long weeks and unsteadily crouches down to take Kiira into her arms, the thought is gone as quickly as it came. Leaving her behind is not an option. Lydia didn't escape death (this time, the time before, the time before that) just to willingly abandon her child.

***

She tells Kiira they're going on a very long trip, and she should pack all of her favorite things, as much as she can, as much as she wants to take. 

In the bathroom mirror, her eyes are wide, her face thinner, as she ties her hair in a pony tail at the nape of her neck and hacks it off with a trembling hand. She lightens her hair to a mousy brown, empties the safe, cleans out one of her bank accounts.

Kiira tells her that her hair looks pretty, and she smiles weakly.

They pack up the car and drive to Albuquerque through the night, Kiira asleep on the backseat and Lydia darting her eyes to the rear view every few seconds.

***

"Could you remove the eyewear, please?"

"Oh. Right." Lydia fumbles with her sunglasses and stares into the flash of the camera.

The vacuum repair man turns to his computer. "I'll get you set up with the new license, new social security number... everything you'll need. And a birth certificate and school records and whatnot for your girl."

She peers over his shoulder, her photograph filling the template of a New York drivers' license. 

"New York?" Her voice catches, inches upward in hope. "You're moving me to New York?"

"State, not city. Little place in Lewis County. Last time I was up that way, I saw more cows than people."

"You can't put me somewhere more... sustainable? Isn't it more likely I'll be noticed in a rural town than in a large city?"

"I'm afraid that's not the way it works," the vacuum man replies with a sigh that makes her think he prefers it when people in her situation shut up and take what they're given. "Anything you particularly want for your new name? That's a lot easier to customize."

"I, ah – no. No. I don't know."

"That's fine." 

He hits a few keys and WARD, PAMELA populates the name field on the license. Lydia wrinkles her nose at it but can't think of anything better. She's too damn tired.

"You can head downstairs with your girl now, Ms. Ward. Shouldn't be more than a night or two before you're ready to go."

As she descends the stairs down to the little basement room, she flashes on that sorry excuse for a lab buried under the Arizona desert. Crouching in the stairs of the old bus, shell casings and dirt raining hellfire on her head

Kiira sees her freeze and asks what's wrong. Lydia swallows, stammers through a smile.

"We're going on another long car ride very soon. This one will be much longer. And when we get where we're going, we're going to play pretend. We're going to pretend to be new people. Doesn't that sound fun?"

Lydia is relieved that Kiira is still young enough and happy enough to have her mother back that she thinks it does sound fun.

***

It's a clapboard farmhouse with peeling paint and a broken screen door. The last few inches of a months old lake effect blizzard still cling to the ground. She can't see her nearest neighbor in any direction.

Kiira wants nothing more than to run and play through the endless, open plains of the fields, so unlike what they had back in Houston, an alien planet to a small child. Lydia stands on the back porch of the farmhouse, arms crossed and eyes narrowed, and shouts to her to come back closer when she gets too near the horizon.

***

That tattoo on Jack's hand. The swastika. She sees that as she's falling asleep.

Todd's thumb, rubbing gentle circles on her upper arm. Fighting the urge to flinch, to tell him to get his goddamned hands off her. She feels that as she starts to wake up.

***

They're there for less than two months before Kiira starts asking when she can go to school. Lydia has been spending her days reading books with her, printing off math worksheets from the internet, paging through a dusty old world atlas she finds in a box in the linen closet, trying not to let all those Spanish lessons from Delores go to waste. But Kiira needs to go to school, Lydia knows that, deep down, knows that she needs to be around other children, that being cooped up here will only make her more afraid, will only spread Lydia's own worries and fears and terrors deeper into Kiira's bones.

After she enrols Kiira, the days seem to get longer, and the sky seems to hang lower. The broken screen door slams in the wind and she jumps out of her skin every time, until she finally rips the thing off its rusted hinges, her scream reverberating across the quiet fields.

***

They were bad people. Everyone who died was a bad person. They had made their own choices, to become criminals. It didn't have anything to do with her. 

Heisenberg failed to kill her. Perhaps the only time he failed. She tells herself that means something. She's smarter than him. She's better than all of them.

She's not a bad person.

The days pass.

***

She lingers on the edge of waking, another time and place holding her back.

"We got almost all Mr. White's money. That's how important getting the cook right for you is to me. It isn't about the money. It's about you... me wanting to help you."

Todd had driven her to a house in the south valley, sparsely furnished, covered in a suspiciously fresh coat of paint for a structure that seemed otherwise held together with duct tape and ignorant hope. 

She'd smiled at him, reminded herself to breathe evenly. "Well, I appreciate that, Todd. I appreciate the improvements you've made."

"I have to say that's all Jesse Pinkman. It was my idea to bring him on board, and I'm real happy with how he's working out."

As he spoke he levered open a thin seam in the drywall with his pocket knife. It popped free and he lifted it to the floor, revealing tall columns of bills insulating the walls.

"See?" he said. "What's most important to me here is our partnership."

Todd's fingertips were heavy on her upper arm, a pressure that moved slowly down to her wrist.

She had smiled again. "Thank you, Todd."

Then she wakes with a grimace and an involuntary jerk to her arm. Her eyes fly open and the columns, the grid, the bills, are projected onto the ceiling of her farmhouse bedroom, lit by morning sun, in another time and place.

***

Sometimes she wishes she'd looked at those bodies in Arizona. What she sees in her mind when the house is empty couldn't be any worse than what it actually was.

Sometimes it's easier to pretend the whole thing never happened. It's a philosophical question. If you order a man's death and never see his corpse, did he even die at all?

***

"So what kind of gun are you looking for?"

Lydia lifts her hands off the glass countertop, subtly wipes her fingerprints off with the sleeve of the ugly black puffy jacket she wears now.

"A pistol," she says, remembering Mike's specificity.

This man is about twenty years younger and has a full head of hair, but his weathered face and dry, blank expression make her want to beg for her life.

"What kind of pistol?"

She swallows. "A good one."

***

Something to do. Lydia just wants _something to do_ , something that isn't patrolling the boundaries of the farmhouse in heavy boots, sinking in mud almost to her ankles. Something to do while Kiira is away, so she doesn't lose her mind, so she can take better care of her in the mornings and the evenings. 

The vacuum man had arranged fake job references, told her how to come up with a fully fabricated employment history. Eventually a bank two towns over hires her as a teller.

Her fingertips itch to touch the money, the weight of a stack of bills feels right in her palm. 

For a moment, she feels like herself again.

***

Her mouth has a permanent aspartame aftertaste. NutraSweet and English Breakfast. Even if she could look at a packet of stevia without the Pavlovian urge to vomit, the small grocery store she uses doesn't stock it. She won't ask them to start.

***

Lydia sits at her window, the name PAMELA clipped to her blouse.

Sometimes when she calls the next person in line over, she sees them reach into a bag or pocket and pull out a gun, set their sights between her eyes and demand all the money in the drawer. 

Sometimes they vault over the counter, jab the barrel under her chin and push her towards the safe.

Her eyes widen as whoever it is approaches, her fingers flexing, ready for the panic button.

"Can I help you?" she asks, and sometimes her voice doesn't waver.

Nobody ever pulls a gun on her.

***

Kiira is in bed and Skyler White is on television.

"My husband didn't start out as a bad person. There was just – it's the economy, it's the lack of affordable healthcare, it's teachers being underpaid."

The interviewer raises a sceptical eyebrow and tilts her head. "So you're saying that society turned your husband into a drug kingpin? Into a murderer?"

Lydia tucks her feet under her on the couch and leans a little closer to the television. The set line of her mouth, the cold look in her eyes: Lydia has seen that before.

"I'm saying that with some unknown combination of pressure put on a person... sometimes people just... break. And nobody sees it coming."

She gets the sense that Skyler White is talking about herself. When the interviewer prompts her with questions about how destitute and destroyed her family is now, what Heisenberg left behind. Not as though she's looking for sympathy, just stating facts. She has her own pressures now, clearly, and it's as though she's broadcasting a warning, asking someone to stop her before she goes the way of her husband. 

Even through the safe distance of television screens and broadcast satellites, that woman still strikes Lydia as a threat, very real and very present. 

She chews her thumbnail, and checks the locks on all the doors and windows.

***

Something is outside. 

Lydia stands on the back porch, half in and half out of the door. The weight of the pistol still feels foreign in her hand and she stares deeply into the dark.

Trees rustle. There's a noise that could be something breathing. It could just be the wind.

"Is somebody there?" Lydia calls out.

The only response is weight moving through the grass, the snap of a branch.

With three quick strides she's at the porch railing, shooting blindly into the night.

Whatever it is runs, retreats, leaves silence and gunpowder in its wake.

There's a scream from inside, bare feet on hardwood floors. "Mommy?!"

"Stay inside, Kiira. Everything's fine."

In the morning, she follows a straight line from where she stood on the porch and carefully combs the ground for blood. She gets desperate, on hands and knees, blades of grass sliding between her fingers.

There's no sign: of life, of death.

***

For a brief moment, she thinks about packing Kiira up in the car and driving southwest, through to Albuquerque. It's too dangerous, she thinks. From what Lydia knows about Skyler White, the woman does not particularly care for unannounced visitors.

She asks the vacuum man for a favour, tracks down the number. 

"Ms. White," she says. "I know where the men who had your husband's money kept it."

The pause is long, but Lydia holds herself back from speaking again.

"Who is this?"

"Somebody you already know too much about."

"You're – the car wash," Skyler White says. "The woman who came to the car wash. You sent men to my house to threaten my children – "

"And I appreciate the co-operation you've shown on that front so far. But as we both know, those men are dead. Given the risk involved, I'm no longer involved in that line of work. I intend to keep it that way. And I need your continued co-operation to do that."

"What do you want from me?"

"I have a business proposition."

"No. No more, I'm not a criminal. Not... I'm not going back to that."

"But what if I could take you to that money, and together we invest in something. Something like your car wash. We launder the money together. We each get our lives back. Nobody gets hurt, nothing goes to waste. The crime has already been committed. It could be a fruitful partnership. Having to keep each other's trust protects us both."

"Where are you?" She sounds wary, but interested. "I'd feel better discussing this in person."

"I'm not in New Mexico," Lydia says. "But I can be."

"Talk to me when you're in town."

It's at once a green light and a caution signal.

***

Lydia tells Kiira they're going on another long trip. When Kiira asks if they'll be coming back to the farmhouse, Lydia says she's not sure, tells her to pack all the favourite things she brought from Houston.

The pistol goes in the top of her bag, within easy reach.

Whichever way this goes, _something_ is going to happen.


End file.
